Automobiles Books

[Carlito Austin]

Writtenin a lively, accessible fashion and drawing extensively on interviews with people who were formerly incarcerated, Cars and Jails examines how the costs of car ownership and use are deeply enmeshed with the U.S. prison system.

Cars and Jails investigates this paradox, showing how auto debt, traffic fines, over-policing, and automated surveillance systems work in tandem to entrap and criminalize poor people. The authors describe how racialization and poverty take their toll on populations with no alternative, in a country poorly served by public transport, to taking out loans for cars and exposing themselves to predatory and often racist policing.

Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including, most recently, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing.

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

It is well-known that people incarcerated in the U.S. are disproportionately Black, brown, and poor, but there is much less recognition of the role played by automobiles in their incarceration. Here, then, is the cycle we take up in the following pages. Behind bars, incarcerated people mourn their lost mobility and they dream of cars they once owned and about cars in their future as a form of freedom. Upon release, they must drive as a basic necessity, but to do so they have to take out auto loans on rapacious terms. Driving exposes them to costly traffic fines from police officers under orders to gin up revenue. A traffic stop, as a primary site of discretionary and racist policing, also opens them to potential arrest and reincarceration. If they are put back in the cage, they will lose their livelihood and all their assets in the process, including the equity in their car. Behind bars again, they start to dream once more, about mobility and cars. This cycle does not always play itself out in its entirety or in such bald terms. Many people sidestep or break free from one or another of its traps. But tracking the steps in the cycle, as we do in this book, helps to illustrate how driving while Black or brown is both dangerous and expensive, as is driving while poor. It also helps expose how the financial system and American criminal justice collude with each other, whether inadvertently or through cold calculation.

The earlier editions of this title have been best-selling definitive references for those needing technical information about automotive fuels. This long-awaited latest edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, yet retains the original fundamental fuels information that readers find so useful.

This book is written for those with an interest in or a need to understand automotive fuels. Because automotive fuels can no longer be developed in isolation from the engines that will convert the fuel into the power necessary to drive our automobiles, knowledge of automotive fuels will also be essential to those working with automotive engines.

Small quantities of fuel additives increasingly play an important role in bridging the gap that often exists between fuel that can easily be produced and fuel that is needed by the ever-more sophisticated automotive engine. This book pulls together in a single, extensively referenced volume, the three different but related topics of automotive fuels, fuel additives, and engines, and shows how all three areas work together.

It includes a brief history of automotive fuels development, followed by chapters on automotive fuels manufacture from crude oil and other fossil sources. One chapter is dedicated to the manufacture of automotive fuels and fuel blending components from renewable sources, including e-fuels. The safe handling, transport, and storage of fuels, from all sources, are covered.

There is also discussion on engine fuel system development and how these different systems affect the corresponding fuel requirements. Because the book is for a global market, fuel system technologies that only exist in the legacy fleet in some markets are included. The way in which fuel requirements are developed and specified is discussed. This covers test methods from simple laboratory bench tests, through engine testing, and long-term test procedures.

Peggy Sauer was one of the "Damsels in Design" at GM hired to work on car interiors. She's shown here with her design for the backseat of a 1958 Oldsmobile. GM Heritage Center/Pegasus Books hide caption

The early cars were hand-cranked, and that was part of why they were very difficult for women to drive. They were very hard to start. Also, they didn't have power steering. They didn't have power brakes. There were some models in which it was very difficult for women to even reach the pedals. ...

It wasn't until 1910 when a man named Charles Kettering developed an electric starter for the car, and this was a real game changer for women because it allowed women to start the car without a great deal of personal strength, and it greatly expanded their ability to use the car when there weren't men around.

In the first instance, the ladies car was an electric car. It was meant for women who were largely very wealthy. For example, Clara Ford drove a Detroit Electric. She did not drive a Ford. That's because in the early days, these combustion engines were thought too difficult for women to start and drive, and also too dangerous. There was also some concern that the combustion engine would create unwanted sexual excitement for women. They vibrated ... so they were not allowed to have them. Wealthy women, by and large, had the electric. They were kind of like golf carts today. They drove them around their estate. They drove them to their friends, for social engagements.

The car coat was designed to help women get in and out of the car. ... I went to the New York Public Library, and I found from Saks Fifth Avenue, a catalog, it was about 200 pages long, and it was all about helping women adapt to this new car culture, which was really very new. So early cars were open. They didn't have roofs. Women got dirty. They were cold. Women were sold ermine blankets. They wore goggles that evolved as the car became more enclosed.

And so women ... were advised by the Ladies Home Journal, for example, to wear gloves, to have a hat with a short veil, because the act of driving a car is performative, and it's always been expected that women dress a certain way and look a certain way. So, for example, Ford had coats that were made to match, used the same material in the interior of the car to create matching handbags, matching coats. So it was a very coordinated thing.

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